


Believing You (Condemns Me).

by Marinne



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Peter Pan & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst I guess, Bad Ending, Character Death, Christian character says eff thou to religion, Did I say Panlix yet, Execution, Felix lives in a monastery, Holiness is something, I can't believe that's a tag or maybe I can, I'm Bad At Tagging, Lying and betrayal, M/M, One-Shot, One-Sided Relationship, Some kind of flashback, That's all I think, There was a plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 19:13:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10040783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marinne/pseuds/Marinne
Summary: “I'm going to make you extraordinary, Felix. Just you see. All you have to do is believe in me.”At the very end of the day, Felix still believes in him, foolish as such a thing is.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first attempt at a Panlix fic and it turned out to be a medieval AU kind of thing that was fleshed out in my head but less so on paper when the early hours of morning came around. Felix is pretty sacrilegious, folks. Just thought I'd let you know.

There existed different kinds of holiness. There was the holy patience of mothers, fathers and guardians of all sorts, who suffered the wickedness of children too young to be moved by anything akin to a conscience. There was the holiness of those who dedicated themselves to doing good, who smiled upon misfortune and urged the world to do the same. There was the holiness of the devout, who prayed for the salvation of those less worthy, who believed in a higher creation that would bestow good upon all souls.

Felix was not holy.

He had simply been a poor wretch that not even parents could want, or so he had been told. He had been given to holy people, left in their holy care, but holiness was not something one could pass onto another, and Felix remained tainted, wicked.

Peter had been salvation. Redemption. The cleanse of all his sins. Felix was not holy, but he hadn’t doubted for an instant that _Peter_ was.

_“Felix, what have you done?”_

None of them could possibly hope to understand. None of them knew what it was like. None of them had felt what it was to own nothing – not even his pitiable, damned soul – only to become Peter's. There was nothing quite so filling for a lonely heart as was believing, and Felix had never believed in anyone – in anything – with so much fervour.

Peter was a rush. He was the cry of the dead man who suddenly realised he was alive after all; he was the surge of adrenaline after a fall that ought to have killed you; he was the power behind the right words and the unbridled force of a tidal wave. He overwhelmed. He came, he saw, he conquered. Felix had been only too willing to fall at his feet, pleading, eager, needing something to put his overflowing faith in. Peter made him believe in God.

It had been spring when they met. A spring many summers ago, in the courtyard of the monastery Felix lived in. A more appropriate term would be haunted, for he didn’t consider it life – to pass through the routine, blind, numb; deaf, dumb. He was a ghost trapped in a body that he wished weren’t his own. On occasion, he wished that no body were his own; that he were incorporeal, free to fly and soar past the walls that trapped him and tied him down, wrestling his spirits to the ground and keeping them in a chokehold.

He didn’t do much, really. Simply helped out where he could and did as he was asked, oftentimes being told to carry out menial tasks such as sweeping or weeding, dusting, painting, running errands for priests before mass and bringing sand to dry the parchment on which the clerics wrote. He wasn’t a monk, nor was being one his aspiration, but rather one of the dozen squalid boys the monastery of had given sanctuary to. There were a couple others like them in the region, stepping in so as to keep the streets clean of scum like them when orphanages were too full to house them.

Much like him, the other boys were of low classes, children whose progenitors hadn’t bothered try to raise. Most were younger than him, nearly all those older having already gotten thrown out of the monastery after they were deemed too troublesome and old enough. They were the usual – sons of whores, children born from illicit relations, bastards and pagans to be corrected and purified. Felix couldn’t remember his parents, but there were some of those there who did; some whose bodies would never forget; some who had the scars to jog their memory if they were ever to come close to doing so.

For boys like those, the monastery really was a sanctuary, a place to strip themselves of the horrors past and look unto a brilliant, new future.

For Felix it was nothing short of a prison.

“Hello. Are you lost?” had been the first thing he said to Peter. It had been a brilliant day. After a rainy morning, the sun raced out to watch over the afternoon, there to let self-satisfied light and warmth wash over the Earth. Felix had caught sight of a stranger crawling over the wall all around the perimeter and followed his shadow shyly, too afraid to really let himself be known until they were almost inside. His eyes fell upon the lithe body of the smaller blonde and grew even more nervous when piercing, bright eyes stared back at him. The boy was prepared for a fight, feline in the way he fell still, watching and listening, judging.

“No,” the boy had said at last. “I came for bread.”

It was the voice of someone who didn’t know him, who didn’t already dislike him, who didn’t think him strange for being so quiet or always sitting on his own. Felix hadn’t really been one to grab opportunities when they presented themselves, but he did so anyway that first time, smiling at the boy as well as he could muster.

“You'll get lost on your way to the kitchens,” Felix announced, carefully nodding in sign to show that he wanted the boy to follow after him as he inched closer to the door. The blond did so, wiping his dirty face on his sleeve offhandedly. He flashed Felix a smile that made his tongue grow heavy, clumsy; too large for the space. Still, the taller boy scrambled to continue talking. “There isn’t really food to spare, but you can have some of mine.”

As it turned out, Peter had been on the run from his good-for-nothing father throughout the three days prior to him meeting Felix. At the time, it hadn’t even crossed his mind to ask such a question. After all, Peter was a stranger with no preconceptions, which came to mean that Felix had the first time in years to acquire that which he wanted more than anything else in the world: a friend.

It wasn’t spring anymore. It wasn’t bright. It was a cold morning in late autumn, when the sun was not yet up, the clouds that had once formed ethereal fields of golden barley in heaven now looking more like bogs of murky water and saturated earth. Seeing his gloom reflected in the sky didn’t take away from the sting, though, rather merely heightening it, making Felix more aware that this was real; that it was happening; that it would be his last morning in this world and no even the sun was merciful enough to come out just a little earlier for him.

A place in the greater scheme of things. He'd been so stupid. So, so stupid. How could he have let himself fall for that – for all his lies – so easily? There was no way he could have ever aspired to be anything more than the waste of space that he was. He couldn’t even blame Peter, for the boy had helped him remember.

“Come out, Felix.”

He said nothing, obeying wordlessly. His wrists were bound together with fried, old rope, scratching uncomfortably against his skin. Then he was allowed to step out of the cell he had been confined to, for the first time in five days. The man in front of him was a holy man, dressed in white, probably there to take the confession he refused to give. Felix fixed his eyes on the man's feet, on the mud and dirt that clung to the hem of his habit, drawing some desperate sort of satisfaction from seeing a holy man treading in filth in much the same way any other would.

Not that it made a difference. At the end of the day, the priest had nothing to do with him. He wouldn’t care about the loss of his life. No one ever had. Felix had been a fool to doubt that for a second.

“Come, child. Do you wish to confess?”

Did he wish to confess? That was an excellent question. The corner of his lip almost twitched upwards at the thought of all those things he would have to say – all those sins that now nested beneath his skin, all those whims of Peter's, from theft to cheats to violence to improper desires. For a moment, he imagined the conspiratorial look he and Peter always shared at moments like that one, when they accompanied each other in delicate flowers of lies, dandelions for them both to blow at the same time and watch fly happily. The residual happiness was soon gone, along with the conjuration of Peter's presence by his mind.

“No.”

It was ironic, really. Felix decided this as he was led outside the monastery and handed over to a couple of guards, who roughly pushed him forwards, towards a cart full of the wrecks that would be losing their voices to the hangman's noose in less than an hour. There was definite _irony_ in the fact that he had been alone his whole life, all but accepted that he would be alone forever, only for Peter to come along and change his reality from head to toe. Then, once the boy had taken all that he had to take, once he had unravelled Felix as much as he wished to, once he was _bored_ of his toy, Felix had been thrown away. In the end, his last moments would be spent with strangers that cared as much for him as he for them, and, at the very end, he would be alone. Completely alone. Just like before Peter came and destroyed the little of him that there was to break.

In spite of it all, staring at the faces of those bored folks who were out already, booing, hissing, spitting, slurring; Felix decided that he would do it all again. He would let Peter wreck him as many times as he wanted, let him treat him as he pleased, do with him what he fancied. Just as long that he could still spend the nights swaying along to his August breeze, fight a thousand battles at the sea of the adventures they cooked up for themselves and follow his morning star home after it all, again and again.

It was pathetic, but it was one of the few truths he knew. Even if short, his time with Peter was precious, worth more than all the honour dirty money could buy those that looked down on them, and – moreover – it was his. Felix had devoted himself to Peter. Regardless of the outcome, he would do it all over. Because he preferred to believe in him – ever-changing like a perfect storm; measured; two-faced like a coin; calculated and merciless – than in everyone else's presumed all-powerful entity that had never done anything for him at all save for allowing his birth.

Yes, it was true that Peter had left him behind. The blond had chosen to save his neck rather than let it snap with Felix's. He had left him in the dust and run as fast as he could, away from where the splatter of blood might still reach to stain him. But at least he had been there, for however brief a time.

_“I'm going to make you extraordinary, Felix. Just you see. All you have to do is believe in me.”_

As his leaden feet dragged themselves up the steps of the platform, pushed up amidst the trail of other prisoners that came to meet their end, and as his eyes of flint without a flame stared out at the sunken faces of the audience with the feel of the noose coming to close around his neck, uncomfortably scratchy, Felix realised that he still very much believed in Peter Pan. Even if that wouldn’t save him where he was going. Not that it mattered, for the truth had remained unchanged: Felix had never been holy in life, and he wouldn’t be so in death.

However, this no longer saddened him. Not when he caught Peter's eyes in the crowd for an instant, just as the ground fell away from under his bare feet and the air left his lungs, for he was certain that they would be meeting again in Hell, and he'd wait for as long as it took.

 

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest, I don’t quite know what I have written, but to hell with it I can’t be the only one that loves the thought of Peter coming along and ~~ruining Felix's life~~ throwing Felix right off the good path. Right?


End file.
